Fic 12 x 20: Natural

Max: drives north, tells the west to reveal, reveal (what he doesn't know) while his sister (still) sleeps head-knocked to the window, still breathing. She wept. Still doesn't fathom it, the well their mother left, or worse, that she left, when she slipped through the veil with her own body, burnt back through.

Pine Ridge

He doesn’t feel any different he doesn’t feel any different. Magic is still magic the way those redwings wire up from the springbrown tallgrass. Dakota. Max. Alicia. Tasha. White sky and hands on the wheel.

Rapid City

Pull over, boy. You’re sleep-driving.

It’s her mom voice, same one she used to tell him, tell Alicia: when you’re a natural you don’t need to borrow. Keep it white, kiddos, the magic, that is. Set that bundle of twigs on the table with a white candle and red thread. Balm and bittersweet. Clasped hands. Love spell.

(Bartender had top-shelf on his breath and would have been hell to read: weird aura, but not like--)

Pull off the road, top up the dream-magic on your sister; drops to your knees on the shoulder,

weep.

Dickinson

Sleep-drive, witch-style. Think in Winchesters, their shoulders knocked together and their feet shuffling and the smell of death sweet around them. Underground. Afterburn of old magic in them and on them, in their jacket pockets. Dean’s shoulders; Sam’s eyes. The way they know—what they know. It wasn’t a trunkful of tools. It was a heart in the hand.

Grand Forks

When you’re a natural you don’t need to borrow. Just what he thinks when the clouds heap up and they pull in at the gas mart and Alicia wakes and he watches her go, shaky, for a pop and a bathroom and sun, twigs blowing up and out of her hair, off in the wind out of Canada.

Emerson

Alicia: wakes again, feels her sternum split, her gut spit, choke-screams just for a second, bright and hot and wet: this is what it is, to know magic as other than buzz; this is what it is to …(shh, her mother says,go back to sleep you’re still you).